


Run, Run, Run

by abovethesmokestacks



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Based on a song, Bucky on the run, Character Study, Gen, I have a lot of feeling about Bucky and I need him to be doted upon by Romanian grandmas, Post-Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-05 01:17:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17315348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abovethesmokestacks/pseuds/abovethesmokestacks
Summary: The Asset doesn’t really know how he ends up here. The borough calls to him, lights the way back like a beacon that he can’t help but follow. His desperate exit from D.C has him shedding his tac suit like old skin, rifling for whatever clothing he can find that fits him, resorting to petty pickpocketing for cash to make it through his days.Brooklyn makes something jar inside him, a vertigo creeping in to grab hold of him when he walks down streets, looks at buildings too long, lingers at intersections. The eyes tell him this is not the same, but the mind disagrees. The mind says ‘home’. The mind says ‘belong’. The mind says ‘Steve’.





	Run, Run, Run

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hellomrschorusgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellomrschorusgirl/gifts).



> Another crosspost from Tumblr. I wrote this for a writing challenge hosted by Annie (hellomrschorusgirl). For the challenge I picked the song "Living in the City" by Rhys Lewis as my inspiration, and this is what became of it.

_Brooklyn, New York, US_

The Asset doesn’t really know how he ends up here. The borough calls to him, lights the way back like a beacon that he can’t help but follow. His desperate exit from D.C has him shedding his tac suit like old skin, rifling for whatever clothing he can find that fits him, resorting to petty pickpocketing for cash to make it through his days.

Brooklyn makes something jar inside him, a vertigo creeping in to grab hold of him when he walks down streets, looks at buildings too long, lingers at intersections. The eyes tell him this is not the same, but the mind disagrees. The mind says ‘home’. The mind says ‘belong’. The mind says ‘Steve’.

The mind should have no memories of either. The mind should be blank, a canvas for handlers to paint missions onto. Simple instructions. Defrost protocols, briefing, supply, exit protocols. A different kind of beacon mercilessly pulling him back. Fulfillment of mission, extraction, debrief, cryo.

The Asset stays only long enough to get on his feet, gather funds, recon his own exit protocols. His body shudders. It says ‘Brooklyn is not the same’. It says ‘I’ve been gone for too long’. It says ‘I’ve been living in the city too long’.

He leaves at first light, a month after D.C.

* * *

_London, UK_

He takes the name offered to him back in D.C. It carries meaning, the mind painting vivid memories of the disbelief and pain in the other man’s eyes. _Bucky_. He keeps it to himself, a closely guarded treasure that won’t be ripped from him again. The mind is oddly cluttered, a strange cesspool of fragments he tries to put into order, overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of it. It makes his head ache, his body shiver, pulls him out of disjointed nightmares.

There is no more cryo, no more resets. He can’t forget, and shouldn’t want to, right? Do normal people wish they could wipe their consciousness clean of all the emotions brought upon them? Measures need to be taken. Self-discipline not encouraged. He is not an asset anymore. Integration critical.

London is bustling, a pulse underneath his skin that refuses to settle. Maybe it’s because Bucky keeps looking over his shoulder, keeps expecting extraction and forcible reset. Like any other metropolitan area, HYDRA has strongholds here. The mind supplies the locations of two (2) storage areas and fifteen (15) resupply caches. These have everything needed for extended missions, but it’s too soon. They will no doubt be crawling with operatives. He cannot risk detection.

Bucky walks around London with that syncopathic pulse beating inside him, takes a job where the bare minimum of questions are asked and his pay comes in a nice stack of bills twice a month. He moves around, tries to stay nondescript. London is great for flying below the radar. It’s cold enough that no one looks twice at the jacket he wears, the gloves covering his hands. He switches between different kinds of caps and hats, lets his scruff grow out. The language adapts in his mouth, bends to the environment, takes on a different cadence. He eats, eagerly tasting anything that strikes him. It’s a wonderful start, he thinks. He can do this, he thinks. It’s okay. Nondescript. Incognito.

Except for when he wakes from his dreams. He screams in an accent his heart refuses to forget, refuses to relinquish until he talks himself back into the one he has adopted for his cover. It happens too often for him to bear it. Something needs to be done. Measures-

 _No_.

He is not an asset. Maybe he can’t go to a shrink like normal people do, but he is not a thing for which measures are taken to fix glitches in the programming. Bucky will… deal with himself. Somehow.

Months crawl by. A notebook finds its way into his belongings, his hands rifling for it in the darkness when he wakes up from another horror playing out in his head. Pages are filled, his writing in the beginning so shaky he can hardly read it. It evens out over time. Memories supply more memories.

London has been good to him. He packs up after six months, the whispers of a HYDRA ops sending him running. It won’t do to be recaptured. It won’t do to be discovered. If HYDRA is here, the man on the br-  _Steve_  might come. Bucky is not ready.

London has been good. He’s been here too long.

* * *

_Vienna, Austria_

He picks his cities with delicate balance. Large so he can blend in, be just another person milling about. His mind readily supplies him with intel on HYDRA presence, number of cryo storages, resupply caches. It is intel he doesn’t want to know how he acquired it, but it undoubtedly proves useful.

Vienna straddles the balance. Bucky can hide, but the number of resupply caches worry him. The city is a hub, a focal point in a network quietly seeping into the continent. But there are no cryo storages, no active ops near as far as he can tell. It will do. It will have to.

It is easier to settle, to find work that will pay in cash, to find shelter, to find a rhythm. For all the niggling worry in the back of his mind, Bucky takes to Vienna a lot better than London. The language is softer, wrapping pleasantly around his tongue as he makes small talk with the men stuck on the same work detail. Bucky tries to think of it as practice. This is normal. Talking, interacting. Staying quiet would be anomalous. He chooses a different name than in London, something universal that speaks both of here and anywhere. Bucky is for his own time.

It’s for the apfelstrudel he eats in a corner of Stephansplatz, watching people milling about while the spire of the Stephansdom reaches towards the sky. It’s for the quiet moments when he wakes one morning because the sun’s rays are filtering through the dirty windows after a night without nightmares. It’s for the moment his detail has been directed to the Wiener Musikverein and the floating notes of a classical piece his mind knows but can’t put a name on stops him dead in his tracks. He wants to break off, sneak closer. Hell, he wants to find a damn air vent so he can crawl unseen into the hall and listen to the piece, the crescendo slowly rising to grip tightly at his heart.

“You have not lived until you have experienced Beethoven in that room.” It’s one of the men he works with, peering at Bucky with a curious smile.

“Then I guess I’ll never live,” Bucky replies, knowing that although he might scrape together the cash needed for a ticket, he could never truly go to a performance.

It doesn’t stop him from buying a burner phone, just so he can waste the preset data limit on listening to the Beethoven piece throughout the nights when he’s ripped awake. The screen gets wrecked on the third night, and he forces his body to learn to only grab the phone with his right hand. The melody soothes him, his tears hitting just as the crescendo starts building. This person he is, the consciousness aching inside his body… It doesn’t quite belong.

Bucky plans his exit meticulously. Vienna has been good, but it’s time to move on. His final paycheck has been tucked away into his backpack, all goodbyes have been said, a convincing lie that will lead any pursuers in the wrong direction should they come looking. The numerous caches in the city are too good to give up. He could hit one of them. Raid it and get out. Five show signs of recent activity. Out. Another five are too old to have updated supplies. Probability of old currency high. Avoid. Three more are nixed because they stray too far from his exit strategy.

He ends up outside an inconspicuous building in Josefstadt. No one has come or gone in the three days he has surveilled it. It underwent a remodel no more than five years ago, meaning supplies needed to be shifted and upgraded. It’s a simple enough mission. Infiltrate, retrieve, exit. Bucky’s heart is beating a mile a minute, his body covered in cold sweat when he walks out no more than ten minutes later with his backpack and duffel filled. Cash, intel, equipment. Everything he needs.

If HYDRA comes looking, they will find their cache raided. They will find their surveillance cameras mangled, showing the face of their ghost just before they flicker out. They will show his picture to the people at the nearby train station, find out a man bought a one way ticket to Bern. CCTV will show the man boarding the train and disappear from Vienna. The ghost knows when to disappear.

* * *

_Naples, Italy_

It’s not the best choice Bucky’s made, but he figures HYDRA would assume he wouldn’t hide out in a city off the coast of the Mediterranean in the middle of summer. Naples is hot as hell, the language takes days to adapt to, he has to wait until a rainy day makes his attire less likely to be held to scrutiny, and even that requires a shopping trip he most definitely did not ask for.

It’s another round of night shifts, another set of envelopes with wads of bills, jumping between safehouses. He sleeps naked under thin sheets that cling to his body when he wakes in the late afternoon. There’s not much to do, he can’t go outside, not while the sun is still blazing down on the city. He fills his notebook - notebooks, now - with memories, rough drawings, newspaper clippings when he can find them and they spark something in his addled mind.

It’s a whirlwind spilling onto the pages, and in the eye of the storm is the man on the- Steve. He knows his name is Steve, every bone in his body, every fiber, every muscle aches in recognition. It’s a feeling of same-but-different, echoes of Steve’s voice in the dark calling for him. His memories supply contradicting images, conversations indicating worry about health and financial situation, vivid memories of the force behind the shield and pulling a heavy body to shore.

Managing the chaos becomes… not exactly easier, but he tries. Out of nothing came everything, and his thoughts beg for order, for synchronicity, for logic. A timeline helps with the nightmares, helps him identify  _when, why, where_.

Being confined like this, it eats away at him. Even after the sun sets, the temperatures remain sweltering, and by the time Bucky sneaks out of the shoddy apartment to go to his shift at the docks, it has cooled down just enough to make his attire of well-worn jeans and a long-sleeved shirt seem inconspicuous enough. Naples, for all its beauty remains largely unexplored.

When it’s time to move on again, Bucky scouts out another cache to loot. He wants to stock up enough that he could survive without having to do another loot in the next city. His manager at the docks didn’t say much. Same as always. Final paycheck, a simple goodbye. Hiding in an alley outside the cache he decided to hit, Bucky realizes that for all that he has tried to fit in in order to remain forgettable, he has not gained a single friend, not a single acquaintance.

His only friend is a man he can’t fully remember.

He leaves Naples a fairly wealthy man, his soul as restless as his legs. Nothing to leave behind, everything to run towards. He should have left long ago.

* * *

_Bucharest, Romania_

Bucky doesn’t intend to make it a home, but Bucharest takes him in and sweeps him up in a bubble where he can relax for the first time in over a year. The city has minimal HYDRA presence, only a few caches that are all a little outdated. The city tells him he is okay. The city tells him it will keep him safe. It provides for him; a small apartment that he pays for with stolen cash, a language that sits comfortably, flows easily from his lips. It’s a far cry from the toughness of Brooklyn, the rough edges of London. It is kinder than the Austrian German, softer than the Naples variation of Italian.

Bucky finds companionships in the old ladies down the hall who keep fawning over “the handsome young man”. They inundate him in food until he can find his bearings in preparing meals for himself, they provide him with a few necessities, call him  _little bear_  in a way that has him smiling instead of telling them he is far more dangerous than any bear could ever be. He tentatively makes a home, something that is his. Maybe it’s a little dark, but it’s all his making, his choices, his preferences. Some part of him settles in that apartment, sinks its roots into the dingy sofa he picked up at a yard sale, takes great pleasure in preparing oatmeal with fresh fruit sliced on top, hums in contentment at the sound of the radio that is perpetually set just a little out of alignment so the voices rasp in a way that his mind says is good and familiar.

Of course he makes plans, works out contingencies. The backpack with his notebooks, his memories, gets stashed under a floorboard he pries loose one night. He walks through ten different kinds of exit strategies, considers distances, destinations, calculates for minimal collateral damage. That is also familiar. If he has to keep one thing of his old life, it might as well be this, because he can use it to keep people safe. He can keep Adela, Ileana and Vera safe. He can make his new life without a fuss. He can be a little bear.

None of this helps the day it all comes crashing down. Bucky knows the second he sees his old moniker in the newspapers, knows the moment he sees an all too familiar silhouette browsing the notebook he’d written in the night before, knows when the tell-tale sound of heavy boots close in, knows when the first bullets start zinging through the air. He should have run away already. But with each bullet blocked, each projectile hurled in defense, flying through the air with his gaze fixed on the roof he’s aiming for, surrounded by law enforcement and a goddamn man in a flying suit, his mind quietly tells him:

_This is where we stayed. This is where we stop._


End file.
